LVRJ.com - Living - DUMBASS-TROLOGY

Dec. 03, 2007
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

FEAR AND LOAFING: SPACE CADET (Astrologer)

Reporter Corey Levitan is lost in space as he attempts to deliver an astrology reading to Dennis McBride.
Photos by Craig L. Moran.

Paco Alvarez, left, looks on as Shelley Fischer assists Levitan with the basics.

Paco Alvarez has problems with his feet. He hasn't told me this, nor is he limping. However, his house of health is ruled by Pisces, which spells trouble. And whenever your sun is in that same house, it's time to consult the podiatry section of your HMO's doctor list.

"My feet are swelling up," the 33-year-old photo archivist replies, "which is interesting."

After a few hours of training by Las Vegas astrologer Shelley Fischer, I am delivering a frightfully accurate reading to Alvarez, who made an appointment to seek advice about his romantic, work and financial situations. According to astrology, the relative position of stars and planets throughout our lives influences our personality and predicts our fate.

"If Lady Diana stood in the middle of nowhere in a field that day, for 24 hours, out of the sky would have come a meteor and killed her," Fischer says. "She had no chance of living with a chart and a transit setting like that." (Transits refer to how the planets trace across the constellations that form the signs of the Zodiac.)

Fischer, 57, is a professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

"In the academic world, I don't discuss it at all," she says of astrology. "They think it's ridiculous and crazy. They say, 'You don't really believe in that.' "

Fischer says she has a standard comeback to colleagues who discover her side business and wince.

"Come see me when you're in a crisis," she'll say while handing the detractor a business card. "You'll call."

Fischer, who claims her clients number in the thousands, charges $100 for an hourlong reading. Clients either phone or sit in the dining room of her house in Las Vegas' Huntridge section.

"I've read for the best of them, " she says, "heart surgeons, politicians, heads of corporations."

People even ask her to read their dogs.

"I don't like doing them," she says. "I find it a little silly."

Astrology was developed in Egypt in the second millennium BCE and influenced everything in Western culture from the pyramids of antiquity to the language we speak today. (The word disaster, for instance, comes from the Latin for bad star.)

Initially, astrology was indistinguishable from astronomy, with predictive knowledge reportedly motivating the stargazing of Nicholas Copernicus, Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler.

"When I'm having some problems in my life and I want to see what is going on," Fischer says, "I can pull up my own chart and get some information and understand."

The day before, for instance, she notes she spent three hours at a nearby Wells Fargo.

"They can't find 5,000 dollars of my money," she says. "They don't know where it went and I was so angry. But I pulled up the charts and, there you go. Damn Saturn's really close to my moon because it's in my second house.

"I knew it."

The money will be found and returned, according to Fischer, when Saturn gets off her moon.

Fischer begins each session by inputting birth information into a horoscope program made by a software company called Io.

"What do you think, I do it by hand?" she asks. "Are you kidding me? Those days are over, man!"

The printer spits out a map of where the planets, sun and moon resided when the client was born.

"Then you have to look at how they align," she says. "Do they align poorly or nicely? Do they bring good energy?"

According to Fischer, computers can never replace astrologists.

"I have to do interpretations," she says. "It's like getting a blood report. What good is it if you don't have a doctor to interpret it?"

The next thing Alvarez's chart tells me is that someone in his immediate family is, or was, in the military.

"My grandfather was a cop," he replies, impressed, adding, "and two other cousins."

I'm feeling that Grandpa came from Europe.

"From Europe through Argentina," Alvarez corrects me. (Hey, no one's perfect.)

Fischer was introduced to astrology while attending college in her home state of New Jersey.

"One day, when I was sitting in the cafeteria, someone brought out a coffee table guide to astrology and I got bit," she says.

By her senior year, she was doing horoscopes.

"Anybody I knew, just for fun," she says.

In 1978, she decided to relocate to Las Vegas. Before teaching, she held jobs selling computers, advising the UNLV men's basketball team and training new recruits at Bally's. But she never curtailed her sideline. In 1988, she even hosted a call-in astrology show on KDWN-AM 720.

"It came on at midnight," Fischer says. "People only listened because they were waiting for Art Bell to come on."

OK, so what I haven't mentioned so far is that everything I have told Alvarez comes from a cheat sheet Fischer prepared while performing the real reading.

"I can't teach you all this," she says. "That's like saying, 'OK, doctor, teach me how to do an operation.' "

I insisted, however, that Fischer let me read for her next client entirely on my own.

"All of your signs are on the east side, not the west," I tell museum curator Dennis McBride.

"Some of them," Fischer corrects me.

"This makes you a very logical person," I continue, unperturbed, though clueless about the accuracy of this statement.

Next, I notice that McBride's sun and moon are both in his career house.

"Wow, I've never seen that before!" I pronounce, which is true.

This cracks Fischer up. (There is no significance to this combination, she tells me later.)

In the 18th century, astrology diverged from astronomy after a couple of problematic discoveries demoted it to pseudoscience: The fixed pinpricks of light in the night sky are actually individual suns, and the constellations they form are not connect-the-dots bulls, lions and scorpions, but random constructs of our earthbound perspective.

By the 20th century, astronomers discovered that the stars aren't even fixed. They wander, like the planets (although a lot slower). They've already wandered so far apart in space that they're millions of years apart in time. (Although their light arrives at your retinas at the same time, the stars you see may never have actually existed simultaneously.)

"Why does astrology work?" Fischer repeats my question. "I don't know, but it does."

Personally, I'd find this claim easier to swallow if, say, all twins were Geminis. But hey, what do I know? A 1988 study of 7,508 subjects -- by Dr. Steven Stack from the Department of Sociology at Auburn University and Dr. David Lester from the Department of Psychology at Stockton State College in New Jersey -- claimed a high correlation between suicidal attitudes and the Pisces star sign. (Kurt Cobain was a Pisces.)

Ronald and Nancy Reagan seem to have run their lives, and the country, using the advice of astrologers in the '80s. And, again, Fischer was accurate in the reading she just gave me to use on Alvarez.

The only thing perfectly clear about astrology, as far as I can tell, is how much I suck at it.

"Let's see," I say, trying to decipher what looks like a Leonardo da Vinci blueprint.

Mars is in McBride's house of sexuality. That means he's dominant in his relationships.

"No," McBride replies.

His south node is in money, which means he's had money in the past.

"No."

OK. Well, the "pitchfork guy" (the symbol for Neptune, I discover later) is in McBride's marriage house.

When McBride asks what this means, I reply, "that's difficult to say," because it is. This is like a social studies quiz I forgot to study for. Finally, Fischer ends the awkward silence.

"What it means that his Neptune in his seventh house is on a trine to his Venus," she says, "and a trine is a very positive thing. So he has great expectations of what his love nature would expect from a partnership."

"Ditto," I say.

"I think you did better as a belly dancer," Fischer says.

Fear and Loafing appears every Monday in the Living section. Levitan's previous adventures can be found at www.fearandloafing.com.